I Met a Man in St. Yves
by sleepysheep
Summary: My first ever Gunmen fic. The Gunmen investigate the death of friend Kimmy, but end up deeper than they ever thought possible.
1. Goodbye Kimmy

I Met a Man in St Yves

I Met a Man in St. Yves, part 1.

Author's Note: This was a Lone Gunmen fanfiction piece that I started on June 26, 2001. I'm not really sure where the idea came from, but that's fine. Please read on. As always, I do not own these characters. I am merely borrowing them.

"Kimmy is dead."

"_What_?" Frohike couldn't believe it. Kimmy, one of the best hackers ever, was dead? They had seen him only last week. It seemed impossible. How could he just have died?

"You heard me," said Langly. He held up a copy of that morning's newspaper. It was the "ordinary" newspaper. The newspaper that didn't tell the whole truth, as the "Lone Gunmen" did. The headline read, "HACKER DEAD." Underneath was a picture of Kimmy.

"I don't believe it!" roared Frohike. "How did he die? What happened? We've got to look further into this."

"Frohike, it's a done deal. He's dead. Besides, didn't you watch the news on TV yesterday?" asked Byers. He was clam and collected as usual. He could stay calm and collected in the worst of situations. He straightened his tie and suit jacket carefully.

"No, I didn't," snapped Frohike. "What happened?"

"He was just standing on the street and someone crashed their car into him. The body was hit at very high impact, so they had a rather hard time trying to figure out who it was. They finally identified him by the teeth."

"Poor Kimmy," said Langly. By now he was a bit hysterical. "He was a brilliant hacker. He taught me almost everything I knew. And now he's—now he's—gone!" He started sobbing. Byers and Frohike looked at each other quizzically, not quite knowing what to do.

Frohike handed Langly a tissue. "Thanks," said Langly. "Um, allergies," he added lamely.

Byers nodded. "I know, I have allergies too," he said in an attempt to make Langly feel better.

"We've got to get to the bottom of this," said Frohike. "Something isn't right? Why did someone just run him over? Did the police get a license plate or anything?"

"No," said Byers. "The only thing they have is an eyewitness who's blind."

"Then how the hell is that an eyewitness?" asked Langly. "More like an earwitness or something."

"She heard tire screeching and Kimmy scream. She said that there was another voice, though. Someone yelled, 'You shouldn't have helped them!' right before he died," Byers recollected what he had seen on the news that previous night.

"You shouldn't have helped them," repeated Frohike slowly. "Who would Kimmy help?"

"He was a hacker," said Langly simply. "That means he could have helped anyone, really. But he had made a bunch of money. He only was hacking recently as favors or for us if we needed him to."

"It's still strange," said Byers thoughtfully. "Who was this 'them' that that guy was talking about? And why did he take Kimmy's life? It must have been important."

"It must have," agreed Frohike. "By the way, where's Jimmy?"

Langly and Byers looked at each other rather sheepishly. They had both been too caught up in Kimmy's death to even think about where Jimmy was. Usually he was somewhere trying to make breakfast or attempting to uncover a conspiracy where nothing was to be found. But he was just gone.

Suddenly, Jimmy burst in the warehouse from the back door. "You guys will never guess what I've found out!" he said, obviously very pleased with himself.

"And what might that be?" asked Langly. He wasn't really up for any of Jimmy's surprises, but since he figured that things couldn't get worse than they already were, he went along with it.

"One of the players on my football league's wife witnessed a murder last night."

"Of course!" said Frohike. "Tell us more, Jimmy."

For the first time that morning, things had started to pick up. Before Jimmy had gone to work with the Gunmen, he was the coach of a blind football league. He now sometimes reported with the Gunmen and funded the publishing of their newspaper.

"Well, the guy's wife, who's also blind, called me up really early this morning. I had told all the football guys that I was going to be a reporter, and he must have told her. So she called me and I got an exclusive interview," said Jimmy, somewhat smugly.

"Way to go, Jimmy!" said Langly. "Did you find out anything that the police haven't?"

"I think so," Jimmy said slowly. "The woman's name is Emily Rhett. She said that she actually knew Kimmy. She didn't tell the police because she doesn't trust them."

"Well, who does?" asked Frohike."

"Anyway," Jimmy continued, "Emily heard this guy yell 'You shouldn't have helped them!' before he ran over Kimmy. She thinks that guy was Kimmy's father. But she doesn't know who he was talking about when he told Kimmy she shouldn't have helped."

"Kimmy's own father wanted to kill him?" Langly thought out loud. "I don't know, I've never met the guy. Kimmy never talked about him."

"Plus that," Jimmy said, "Kimmy's father has disappeared. We can't find him anywhere. You don't think that he's dead, too, do you?"

"We don't know," said Frohike. "But this is good stuff, Jimmy. Maybe you can become a real journalist after all."


	2. Lawyer Visit

I Met a Man in St

I Met a Man in St. Yves, part 2.

Author's Note: I am still borrowing the characters. This is the second chapter to previous, as you have probably guessed.

"Byers! Frohike! Jimmy! I've found something," Langly shouted from his computer. He had been desperately searching the Internet and any other files that he could access for information about Kimmy's death.

They rushed over to Langly immediately. "Look here," Langly pointed at his computer screen. "I searched for Kimmy on the Internet. He's all over the place since he used so many aliases. But I had never seen this one before."

"Juliet 64? That was his alias?" asked Frohike.

"Wait, wait," said Byers. "Juliet 64? Does this have anything to do with _Romeo_ 64?"

"That's exactly what I thought," said Langly. "But Romeo 64 was a fake, remember?"

The Gunmen had once found out about Romeo 64, a group thought to be responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Byers's namesake. Supposedly, Yves was a member of Romeo 64, but Romeo 64 just ended up being a scam.

"Look here," Frohike pointed to the screen. "It says that one of his most brilliant hacks was into an email account for an A. Hadley Revelsow."

"And guess who A. Hadley Revelsow is," said Byers grimly.

"The President!" Jimmy offered.

"No, you cephalopod!" said Langly in disbelief. "Lee Harvey Oswald! Yves!"

"Oh," said Jimmy. "I understand."

"That's a first," said Frohike sarcastically. Frankly, he was sick of Jimmy. If it weren't for Jimmy's break in the story, he would have probably thrown him out the window.

"Frohike," said Byers warningly. Byers always felt as though it was his duty to keep peace among Jimmy, Frohike and Langly. Although he himself was of the opinion that Jimmy wasn't quite sure of what he was doing, he defended him nonetheless.

"So what are we supposed to do now?" asked Langly. "We have a lead, somewhat. Yves. She had Kimmy hack into an email account and he was probably killed for it."

"Are you even sure that this is it?" asked Jimmy. "I mean, could he have done another hack and got killed for that?"

"Probably not," thought Langly. "He hasn't hacked all that much lately, so far as I know, but if he knew Yves, he might do it for her. Either that or she paid him a bunch of money."

"He did love money," agreed Frohike. "Maybe even more than it was worth. He had gotten in trouble before because he had become too careless in his work. He was caught once, but managed to get out of jail by offering a security guard with money."

"Money makes the world go 'round," said Byers. Frohike and Langly started laughing at him. "What's so funny?" Byers was confused.

"That coming from you," Langly said. "You look like a banker."

Byers rolled his eyes. "At least I'm not wearing Ramones shirts," he said. Langly threw him a malevolent glare and continued typing.

"So where's Yves?" asked Jimmy. "I know she didn't show up yesterday."

"I bet she's long gone," grumbled Frohike. "She's too smart to stay around here. Or does she stay around here? Where does she live, anyway? We really don't know anything about her."

"She helps us in times of need," Jimmy said a bit uncertainly.

"What about this time of need?" said Langly. "One of our friends is dead. What are we supposed to do about that?"

"The only thing we can do," said Byers. "Find out the truth." He went to his own computer and started typing on the keyboard. Yves had Kimmy do hack into an email account that had some document in it, something obviously very important. If only he could figure out what it was.

_Knock, knock._

"I'll get it!" Jimmy called. He walked up to the front door and looked into the little television screen set up so the person outside was visible.

"Who is it?" asked Frohike.

"I'm not sure," shrugged Jimmy. "Should I let him in?"

"Sure, why not?" asked Frohike.

Jimmy opened the door and saw a man. He was fairly young and wore a slightly wrinkled brown suit that was a bit too big for him. He carried a shiny black briefcase.

"May I come in?" he asked pleasantly.

"I suppose. Do you have any weapons; knives, guns, etc. on your person?" Frohike asked.

"No." 

"Do you have anything that would be of importance to us?"

"I think so," said the man. He quickly sidestepped Jimmy into the warehouse. "I am a lawyer, you see."

"A _lawyer_? Are we in some kind of trouble?" Langly emerged from the back.

"No, no." The man smiled a polite business smile. "But I am afraid that I have some bad news. Your friend Yves has passed away."

"Yves? No way!" Jimmy exclaimed. "She can't be dead. How did she die?"

"Killed. In a car accident."


	3. Jimmy's Clue

Chapter title here

Jimmy's Clue.

"So Yves is dead, Kimmy is dead, and we only have what Emily Rhett told Jimmy." Langly hit his computer keyboard in frustration. "Where are we going to go with this? Yves was the only thing that we could get a lead off of."

"Aha!" said Jimmy. "Remember how you guys always said that we'd be better off without her? It's not true! You miss Yves, don't you." He smiled smugly.

Frohike rolled his eyes. "Jimmy, Langly does not speak for all of us. I'll admit, she does give us good leads even if she does take advantage of us. She likes money more than other people. She needs to learn that money isn't the key to life."

"There we go with money again," said Byers. "I told you, money makes the world go around. But does this particular case have anything to do with money?"

"Possibly," Langly said. "After all, if there wasn't money involved, would Yves even bother getting herself involved. So we're talking a large sum of money here."

"Great," said Byers. "All that we really know is that Kimmy was killed because he helped someone. Some people," he corrected himself. "Yves hired Kimmy to hack into an email account. Maybe it was to get a bank number or something."

"Or where to find buried treasure!" Jimmy's eyes lit up. "That's exactly it. The email had an address and it told Yves exactly where the treasure was buried."

"It's a possibility," Langly said. "Surprisingly, it does sound plausible. Some criminals are pretty stupid, you know." He started banging on his computer again.

"Langly, computers aren't all that cheap, you know!" Byers tried to stop Langly in case he had done some permanent damage to the machine. Sometimes Langly did things rather impulsively.

"Hey, look at this," Frohike pointed to the monitor. "You just brought something up."

"It looks like an instant message or something," said Byers. "It has an email address. [Macbeth@netmark.com][1]_._"

"Maybe that's the hacked address," Jimmy suggested.

Frohike looked at Jimmy. "Jimmy," he said, "sometimes I wonder. How can you not understand the simplest things and yet you think up ideas like buried treasure?"

"Just lucky, I guess." Jimmy smiled.

"Hmmm. Well, I'll start hacking into Macbeth." Langly pushed a few more keyboard keys. "What's with all of these Shakespeare names, anyway?"

"Some kind of code, a society?" Byers suggested.

"Maybe. But I'll hack into it and see if we can find any information. It's probably all gone. I don't think these people are that stupid," said Langly, hacking away. "We really need to get a higher connection."

"We can't afford one," said Frohike. "We need to sell more papers. By the way, whatever happened to last week's 'Lone Gunmen,' anyway?"

"I don't think we actually picked it up from the publisher," Langly said, still hacking.

"We really ought to make this a monthly publication," mumbled Byres.

"Done," Langly said with satisfaction. It was always nice to finish a hack so quickly. "It looks like most everything's been deleted, but there's one message here." He opened the message.

"'They write a newspaper,'" Frohike read off of the screen. "They're talking about us!"

"Us?" asked Jimmy. "But what did we do?"

"We fought the good fight, we uncover the truth and warn the American people!" said Langly. "They're worried about us. They can't stop us! We're finally getting known!"

"Alright," said Frohike, taking charge. "What we need to do now is find out anything we can about Yves. We need to know what she wanted in that email account. Langly, you and Jimmy go down to Kimmy's house and see if you can find anything about the hack. We'll meet up later."

"Right," said Langly. "C'mon, Jimmy, let's go."

"Do you even know where Kimmy lives?" asked Jimmy in the Gunmen mobile later.

"I think so," said Langly. "We can always get Frohike to look up the address if we have to. But here we are," he said, pulling the beat up van into a small driveway. "Let's do some digging." They walked up the driveway to the front door. "Kimmy always had a spare key somewhere," he said. "It's here in the bushes somewhere."

Jimmy watched with interest as Langly dove facedown into a rather prickly bush. "It's in here—ouch—somewhere," he yelled from within the bush. "I found it!" he said triumphantly, after a few minutes.

Kimmy's house was well decorated. He had quite a few expensive pieces of furniture lying around. "He must have made a lot of money," Jimmy observed.

"Hacking's a pretty well paying job. You just have to be good at it," said Langly as he sat down at Kimmy's computer. "Frankly, I'm surprised that this place isn't crawling with policemen."

"Maybe they're looking for Yves," suggested Jimmy.

"According to them, Yves doesn't exist," Langly pointed out. "She never has, never will. She has so many different anagrams for her name that no one's really so sure who she is—or was."

"Do you think that Yves Adele Harlow was her real name?"

"Most likely not. I'm guessing that she's just borrowing it. Useful set of letters, though. I bet she could make a million names. If she already hasn't." Langly continued accessing files. "Most of everything's been wiped out, but I think I can restore some of it. Even though Kimmy was a hacking genius he was pretty careless about where he left his files. But someone else probably deleted them."

Jimmy had wandered into the kitchen by now. Sometimes it was so hard keeping up with the Gunmen. He was really happy to be part of the team. They were admirable, he thought. They were so dedicated to finding the truth and telling everyone about it. If only he could do the same.

It was so difficult, sometimes, to notice the details. He just had to keep his eyes open. Details were everything sometimes. Jimmy scouted around in the kitchen, looking for anything strange or unusual. Everything appeared to be ordinary.

He walked out of the kitchen and into the living room. He sat down on one of the chairs, trying to think clearly. Then he noticed something very odd. There was a tiny little slit in the leather down the side, near the back. He was actually very surprised that he even noticed it. He slipped two fingers into the slit, trying to find what was in there, if anything. But there would be something in the slit. At least, there always was in the movies.

Jimmy pulled out little box. It appeared to be a mint tin. He opened the mint tin slowly and carefully, as if something would suddenly pop out. There was a folded up piece of paper. It read: 

__

When I first met St. Yves

I knew she had something up her sleeve.

Clocks don't only tell time

Underneath a large pine.

"I have absolutely no idea," said Frohike as they all crowded around to see the note. "It looks like some kind of riddle."

"Riddle? How are we supposed to figure out a riddle?" asked Jimmy. He wasn't very good at this kind of logic.

"Well, it says something about St. Yves. Is that the Yves we know?" Langly puzzled aloud.

"There's a St. Yves street over in the next town," said Byers, trying to be helpful.

"Let's go."

   [1]: mailto:Macbeth@netmark.com



	4. Explanation

Last chapter

Explanation.

"We're on St. Yves street. We need to find a large pine tree and a clock should be under it," said Byers. It was definitely a case of easier said than done. Many of the pine trees were rather large.

"I suppose we should start digging," said Frohike. He spotted the nearest large pine tree and started digging around the base.

"Is there some kind of law that prohibits this kind of activity?" asked Langly worriedly.

"Not if no one catches us," said Jimmy. He too started digging by a tree.

"What the hell," Langly grumbled as he started digging by Jimmy's tree. He heard the click of metal click metal. Carefully, he pushed the dirt away and discovered a pewter clock. "Guys!" he yelled. "Guys, I found it!"

Frohike and Byers ran over to where Langly was, looking at his newfound treasure.

"Awe, guys, I knew it! There would be buried treasure!" Jimmy said excitedly.

"Oh, shut up, Jimmy." Langly snapped. "Look, there's an address etched in the back of the clock."

"Indeed," said a new voice. A female voice.

Jimmy, Frohike, Byers and Langly turned around. They couldn't believe their eyes. It was Yves. She was alive.

"Yves!" they exclaimed at once.

"Yes," she smiled. "I'm alive. Surprised you, didn't I?"

"We thought you were killed in a car accident," said Jimmy.

"Technically," she said, "I was. Let me explain…"

The Gunmen eagerly sat down and as Yves began her tale.

"I was looking for my father," she began. "He was a brilliant man. He had a business partner named Frank Limmon. They made quite a bit of money together, even though it wasn't exactly honest money. My brother was also in the business."

"What kind of business was this?" asked Frohike curiously.

Yves smiled again. "I would tell you, but I'd have to kill you."

"Go on," Jimmy encouraged. "What happened then?"

"One business deal went very bad for the three of them. It would have meant millions of dollars for the company, millions of dollars for each of them. But there was a mistake on Frank's part, and he blamed my father. My father knew he was innocent, but Frank didn't care. He killed him.

"My brother knew that Frank had killed my father, but he kept quiet. He loved money, and wanted to continue business with Frank. Frank knew that my brother knew who killed my father, so he tried to kill him. But he didn't."

"He killed Kimmy instead," said Byers.

"Exactly," Yves said. "They look remarkably alike. So Frank killed Kimmy. My brother knew then that he had to go into hiding, since it meant that Frank would immediately go after him again if he knew he was alive."

"Why did you have Kimmy hack into Frank's email account?" asked Langly.

"I wanted to know where the office was located and possibly Frank's address," said Yves. "The business was so secretive, I didn't even know where they were located."

"Then what happened?" Frohike asked.

"My brother was friends with Kimmy, actually. He was the one who told me about the Octium 4 chip. He was the one that left the note in the mint tin. He wanted me to find the clock, because it would have Frank's address on it. He wanted me to kill Frank in revenge for killing my father. But my brother, being forgetful, forgot where he had hidden the mint tin and I didn't know where to look in Kimmy's house. So I had him hack into Frank's email so I could try and find it. Maybe Frank's address would be in the email account.

"But now my father is dead, my brother is in hiding. I don't know what to do now. Frank can't find out about me or else I'll be killed." Yves put on her sunglasses and stood up. "Thank you very much, you three," she said sincerely. "You've really helped me. I'll keep in touch." She walked back to her car and drove off.

"Well, all's well that end's well, right guys?" said Byers.

"Do you think that she was even telling the truth?" Langly wondered.

"I think so," said Jimmy.

"Well," Frohike said, "we've solved a mystery and can't tell anyone. We don't even have a cover story for this week's issue."

"I don't know," said Jimmy. "We could always report on the latest alien findings."

The four walked to the van and drove off, not quite knowing what the future would bring, or if Yves would ever even come back.

"All of life's a mystery," Byers said.

Frohike, Langly and Jimmy agreed.


End file.
